Key error when selecting columns in pandas dataframe after read_csv

Question

I\'m trying to read in a CSV file into a pandas dataframe and select a column, but keep getting a key error.

The file reads in successfully and I can view the datafr

Answer 1

use sep='\s*,\s*' so that you will take care of spaces in column-names:

transactions = pd.read_csv('transactions.csv', sep=r'\s*,\s*',
                           header=0, encoding='ascii', engine='python')

alternatively you can make sure that you don't have unquoted spaces in your CSV file and use your command (unchanged)

prove:

print(transactions.columns.tolist())

Output:

['product_id', 'customer_id', 'store_id', 'promotion_id', 'month_of_year', 'quarter', 'the_year', 'store_sales', 'store_cost', 'unit_sales', 'fact_count']

Answer 2

if you need to select multiple columns from dataframe use 2 pairs of square brackets eg.

df[["product_id","customer_id","store_id"]]

Answer 3

The key error generally comes if the key doesn't match any of the dataframe column name 'exactly':

You could also try:

import csv
import pandas as pd
import re
    with open (filename, "r") as file:
        df = pd.read_csv(file, delimiter = ",")
        df.columns = ((df.columns.str).replace("^ ","")).str.replace(" $","")
        print(df.columns)